Cracking Facebook Marketing: Figuring Out What Works and What Doesn’t

Cracking Facebook Marketing: Figuring Out What Works and What Doesn't

Nobody said that marketing strategies were predictable. You have no idea what the next big thing is, what tagline will catch the attention of customers, and what product or service will explode in the market to cause such a rage that you can barely keep up with sales orders. Yet there are certain metrics that are available that allows you to analyze how effective your marketing tactics are so you can refine your strategies to get more conversions.

Then there is Facebook.

The numbers don't lie. About 93% percent of businesses see Facebook as the perfect way in reaching their desired audience with product offers, service information and other engaging marketing content. This fact shouldn't be surprising. Facebook has 1.59 billion users with active accounts in January of 2016 and nobody sees these numbers dwindling. Businesses aren't going to pass by the opportunity of reaching this audience when using their marketing dollars.

Does Facebook Marketing Work?

Yet, this question is the stickler. Does marketing on Facebook actually work? Over half of small business owners have no clue if their marketing strategies are effective on this social media platform, or they believe that it doesn't work at all. Yet they keep throwing the advertising dollars to the wall to see what sticks hoping they will have positive results.

Perhaps the greatest problem with marketing on Facebook is that most business owners don't know what metrics they should be analyzing. Are they looking for better click-throughs, higher reach, or more page shares? Having definable key performance indicators for their marketing efforts would give them the snapshot on how effective, or how poorly, their efforts are. As such, studying organic reach has shown low results, as in April of 2015 it reached only 4.11 percent. Even those numbers don't give a clearer, in-depth picture into Facebook marketing reach and what you would need to do to improve.

Ways to Gain Facebook Marketing Data

While it is said that there are no universal benchmarks to track successful Facebook marketing, it doesn't mean that small businesses must remain in the dark over whether their strategies are working. It just requires more proactive approaches in gathering specific success or failure rates on that site based on what your particular goals are.

Facebook has a statistical tool called Insights that allows you to see certain metrics about your page. You can look at the number of fans, the number of likes, how viral certain posts have become, your reach and other in-depth data. Based on what marketing performance information you are collecting about your business, you can use this data with other analytical business reports to see how much of an impact your content has in relation to your marketing efforts. You may be able to see trends or patterns where users engaged more with specific content, and then see if there is any correlation where it might show that users went beyond that Facebook content to log into your company website or called to purchase products and services.

The page metric information is available to everyone. Small businesses may find that this data can help them better understand how their marketing campaigns are performing on this platform.